Who were the Waldensians, and what did they believe?

They had the highest reputation everywhere, even from their worst enemies, for modesty, frugality, honest industry, chastity, and temperance. "In no instance," says a high authority, but not very favourable to what he calls the antisacerdotalists, "are the morals of Peter Waldo and the Alpine Bible-Christians arraigned by their bitterest foes." Their mortal sin was found in their appeal to the scriptures, and to the scriptures alone, in all matters of faith and worship. They rejected the vast system of tradition-religion, as maintained by the church of Rome. Both in life and in doctrine they were noble witnesses for Christ and the simplicity of the gospel; but they formed a powerful protest against the wealth, the power, and the superstitions of the dominant religion. They rejected the almost innumerable sacraments of Rome, and maintained that there were only two in the New Testament — baptism and the Lord's supper. In general we may say that they anticipated and held the same doctrines which, after the lapse of three centuries, were to be promulgated by the Reformers of Germany and England, and which form the creed of Protestants at the present time.

That the church of which Jesus Christ is the only Head sprang from the word of God, and subsists by the same word 2. That the church ought to observe no other laws, and is not subject to the traditions of men. 3. That the death of Christ on the cross is a sufficient expiation for the sins of the whole world, and they that seek salvation in any other way deny Jesus Christ. 4. That it cannot be proved by any testimony of scripture, that the body and blood of Jesus Christ is corporeally received in the sacrament. 5. That the sacrifice of the mass is opposed to scripture, and derogates from the sacrifice of Christ. 6. That Christ is the only intercessor and advocate for His people with God the Father. 7. That the existence of a purgatory cannot be proved from scripture; therefore, the prayers, ceremonies, and annual services for the dead are useless. 8. That the worship of images, statues, and pictures is contrary to the word of God. 9. That marriage is not forbidden to any order of men. 10. That all lewd persons ought to be put out of the communion of the church, as the scriptures teach us; for nothing is more unbecoming the order of priesthood than a lewd and unchaste celibacy.*

"That the gospel is the only rule of faith, and the assertion erroneous that it is nothing without the approbation of the Church of Rome; that Christ is the only head of the church; that all traditions are to be rejected; that the attempt of the clergy to justify their pomp, their riches, honours, and dignities, is the cause of the divisions in the church, that penances are the dictates of tradition alone, and do not avail to salvation; that the mass is not a sacrifice, but simply the commemoration of the sacrifice of Christ; that meats are indifferent; that God has not forbidden marriage to any class of Christians, and consequently it is wrong to interdict it to priests, whose celibacy has become the cause of great licentiousness of manners. To give absolution for money is to be guilty of simony; that God alone has power to forgive sins the word of God says nothing of purgatory. The assertion that grace is necessarily derived from receiving the sacraments is a doctrine of modern invention, that no person ought to be molested for his opinions, as it is for the magistrate to stop the progress of those which tend to disturb the public peace."*

As to the antiquity of the Vaudois themselves, some remarks may be useful. Waldo's history is well known. He appeared about 1170, was at first well received by the Pope, but forbidden to preach; he did however and was driven from Lyons. He had nearly all, if not all, the Bible translated, and was very active, having given away all his fortune. The upholders of popery have taken great pains to shew that the Vaudois were in many points conformed to the followers of the Pope. Now there were many points as to which they were in the dark. The infamy of the clergy, degraded by species of vice which none can call in question, had roused the conscience of many, and more as to practice and the acts by which they made money than as to dogma. But purgatory, consecration to the priesthood and indulgences, confession to priests, prayers for the dead, were all rejected. They are charged by ritualists with recognizing penances of prayers, fasting, alms. There is truth in this; but they appear to have been as opposed to indulgences which had obliterated all true discipline. They rejected oaths on confession extorted by torture. Andrinus Crespini, or Valoy, said there was no purgatory but in this world; he denied the spiritual power of the Pope, prelates and clergy, disapproved of the invocation of saints, kept no feasts or fasts of the church, gave no honour to images, had no faith in holy water. This was half a century before the Reformation. The superstition and vices of the clergy and church of Rome - that they rejected; holding the common faith of the church at large, without any apparent protestant doctrine of justification by faith. This was the case also with the revival in Moravia and Bohemia of Hussitism before the Reformation, closely connected as it was with the scattered Waldenses, as their history plainly shews. They did not then like the doctrine of justification by faith when brought from Luther. Todd seeks to insinuate that they held the seven sacraments; but his own quotation proves that they did not hold extreme unction as really such, though he speaks of Perrin's only giving what refers to the abuses of the Roman Catholics. Nor, it is clear, did they hold priestly ordination at all.*

358 And now as regards the origin of Vaudois. Of Waldo I need say nothing. The facts as to him may be found in most church histories, and (with a trifling difference) the date of his coming forward as a herald of what truth he knew, and getting the scripture translated. He was forced to retire from Lyons, but it is admitted that the Vaudois sect was spread over all Western Europe. It is said Philip Augustus of France in the earlier part of the thirteenth century razed three hundred castles of Vaudois Seigneurs. This could hardly be from Waldo, who only began to preach at the end of the twelfth. But further Waldo first received serious impressions from a Troubadour, of whom many carried piety and anti-Roman doctrines around where they penetrated with their songs; and it is expressly said by Stephen of Borbonne that when driven out, Waldo went and joined other heretics of Provence and Lombardy. They were therefore already there. And this question then arises, Were these simply Albigenses or Manicheans as is alleged? That there were Manicheans spread from Bulgaria, originally from the east of Asia Minor, on into Spain itself, can hardly be questioned. But not even the Inquisition ever charged the Waldenses with this. The archives of the Inquisition of Toulouse published by Limborch demonstrate this; and the well-known testimony of Reinerius Saccho which declares that they live justly and believe all the articles of the creed; which makes them, he says, so dangerous. But, if we are to believe Mosheim, there were two parties even among these Bulgarian teachers who filled the whole south of Europe, and particularly Lombardy and the south of France, the latter being exterminated by the crusade of de Montfort, for which the Inquisition was invented. The one, or Albenanses, really held the doctrine of two principles, and thus were Manicheans; the other Baioli, of whom came the Albigenses, held nothing of the kind, but that there was one God the Creator, Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but that Satan, after his fall, had ruined the earth, making the four elements. So they were divided into three parties as to the flesh of Christ, some holding He took flesh of the Virgin Mary, some not; others that He took it really and suffered in it, but did not take it to heaven on His ascension. The sacraments of the Roman body they wholly rejected. They had a certain but unsatisfactory faith in the Trinity. All this had nothing to do with the Vaudois.

359 We have clearly then, I think, three parties: Waldo's followers, who amalgamated with the Vaudois, and the Cathari, of whom there were two parties, Manicheans, and non-Manicheans, though of unsatisfactory doctrine. We cannot be surprised, as all were opposed to Rome, at Rome's burning all together. She did not care for truth but for authority, and pulled up some tares contrary to Christ's direction and much wheat (as the blessed Lord foretold) with it. She will have to answer for the blood of all saints. But if we seek to trace out the history of the Vaudois proper, those of the valleys of Piedmont, it is not very difficult.

We might fill pages with quotations from their worst enemies as to the soundness of their faith, the purity of their morals, and the simplicity of their manners. We will only give two or three from the highest authorities in the church of Rome. "They denied," says Baronius, "the utility of infant baptism; that the bread and wine became the body and blood of the Lord by the consecration of a priest; that unfaithful ministers had any right to the exercise of ecclesiastical power, or to tithes or firstfruits; that auricular confession was necessary. All these things the wretched men asserted that they learned from the Gospels and Epistles, and that they would receive nothing, except what they found expressly contained therein; thus rejecting the interpretation of the doctors, though they themselves were perfectly illiterate." Reinerius, the inquisitor, and persecutor of the Albigenses, says, "they were the most formidable enemies of the church of Rome, because they have a great appearance of godliness, because they live righteously before men, believe rightly of God in all things, and hold all the articles of the creed; yet they hate and revile the church of Rome and the clergy; and in their accusations they are easily believed by the people." St. Bernard, who knew them intimately, lived amongst them, yet deemed it his duty to oppose them as being enemies to the pope, candidly admits, "If you ask them of their faith, nothing can be more christianlike; if you observe their conversation, nothing can be more blameless, and what they speak they make good by their actions. You may see a man, for the testimony of his faith, frequent the church, honour the elders, offer his gifts, make his confession, receive the sacrament. What more like a Christian? As to life and manners, he circumvents no man, overreaches no man, does violence to no man. He fasts much and eats not the bread of idleness; but works with his hands for his support."*

What principle of "Brethren," I demand, did Socinus ever adopt? The perfect sufficiency of the Word? The personal presence and power of the Spirit? The fact is, he opened his career by writing in defence of the Polish Unitarians, and he closed it by reducing their anti-trinitarian opinions to a system, and their scattered parties to a pretty compact body, with a clergy like their neighbours. His views of sin, justification, baptism, the Lord's supper, and ministry, not to speak of the denial of the proper Deity of Christ and the personality of the Holy Ghost, were always and in every respect opposed to those held by the "Brethren." All flowed from his fundamental error of making reason both the standard of truth and the power of apprehending it. So, again, the reference to the Quakers can only be from unacquaintance with the subject. For in every normal meeting of "Friends," they have a bench of elders, and distinct and appointed ministers, among whom women figure not a little. Had Mr. Carey said, that there were a few points of coincidence between the old Waldenses and the "Brethren," he would not have been so wide of the mark. The reader can judge by the following extract from Gieseler (vol. ii., pp. 376 and seq.) "Like Peter de Bruis and Henry, the Waldenses were free from all heresies of opinion, and sought only to restore an apostolic purity of practice. About the year 1170, their founder, Peter Waldensis of Lyons, with a number of followers (Pauperes de Lugduno, Sabatati) began to preach the gospel after the manner of the primitive apostles. So far were they at first from any intention of separating from the church, that having been forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they applied to Pope Alexander III for permission (A.D. 1179). But having afterwards been excommunicated by Lucius III. (A.D. 1184), they thought it their duty to obey God rather than man, and separate from a church which prohibited that which they felt themselves called to do. At first they differed from the church only as to the exclusive right of the clergy to preach … Even where their name was not openly adopted, the influence of their example is seen in the newly-awakened zeal of the people to read the Scriptures for themselves."

But as it is not so much our object at present to trace the history of these ancient, simple, and devoted christian people, as to bring out another feature of the papacy under Innocent, in its most fully expressed blasphemy and cruelty; we will merely satisfy the reader as to who these people were, and as to the scene of their slaughter. "The terms," says Dr. Gilly, "Vaudois in French, Vallenses in Latin, Valdisi in Italian, and Waldenses in English ecclesiastical history, signifying nothing more or less than 'men of the valleys;' and as the valleys of Piedmont have had the honour of producing a race of people who have remained true to the faith introduced by the first missionaries who preached Christianity in those regions, the synonyms have been adopted as the distinguishing names of a religious community, faithful to the primitive creed, and free from the corruptions of the church of Rome."

But mark, contemporaneously, another party, which had its spring in those early times before Protestantism — the remnant or "the rest," mentioned in Thyatira, as it is said, "As many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak." Who are they? They are such, in my judgment, as the Waldenses, that is, a body of Christians who feared the Lord, though in ignorance, who lived before the days of the Reformation, yet quite refused the wickedness of Rome, and who were, therefore, distinct from "My servants" found in and seduced by Rome. These rejected the overtures of the harlot, but, at the same time, they were more known for their practical godliness than for any clearness in the truth of God. They were exceedingly unintelligent, as we should call it. They but imperfectly understood even justification. Compared with the measure of the Reformation, they were far behind; and it is remarkable that they have remained much in the same state. They seem to have paid little attention to light from without, which is common in these days of ours. Substantially they only retain their old attitude. They were, no doubt, undermined, abused, attacked by everything that either the power or wiles of Rome could do to destroy them. But there they abode in their secluded valleys, and there they are still, and I believe there they will remain till the Lord comes — not merging into Rome on the one hand, nor Protestantism, nor fuller light on the other. They retain the peculiar place, which they had even before the Reformation. Here, then, is the picture; and I ask, Is it not striking that from the first the Lord should have so sketched it out? There is nothing like it previously, and nothing like it in what follows. It began at that time and no other; and let us always remember that this state of things goes on till the Lord comes.

According to the testimony of both ancient and modern historians, the doctrines and the ritual of the old church were of the simplest character compared with the Greek or Roman, though a long way from the simplicity of the New Testament. They taught the oneness of the Godhead; the Trinity, the divine and human nature of Christ, redemption through His death, and the eternity of future rewards and punishments. They regarded the Lord's supper as a symbol, not a miracle; they took the bread and wine as our Lord commanded these should be taken — in remembrance of Him and they did not refuse the wine to the laity. Their hierarchy consisted of bishops and priests, with other ministers, and that a particular service was employed at their ordination. Marriage was usual among the clergy. There were also monasteries with monks living in them, sworn to poverty, chastity, and obedience to their abbot. That churches were built in honour of martyrs, each church had many altars; and the service, which was performed in the Latin tongue, was chanted by the priests. Disputes were finally settled by provincial synods, held twice a year, beyond which, on matters of discipline, there was no appeal. So that we see the doctrines of the old church were characterised by a true apostolic simplicity, and as an institution it was free and unfettered.*

They held that no ordinances of the church introduced since the ascension of Christ were of any value, and should not be observed,